Aaron White

Dear Every Site That Paginates Articles

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:35:44 -0500

I’m sure you split stories like this into two pages for a good reason: to save my bandwidth. After all, the remaining 3,126 characters of the story’s body (1,530 bytes as transferred with gzip compression) would have increased the page’s total size by 0.0032%.
No, I’m just yanking your chain. I know you’re double-charging your advertisers for the same story by artificially inflating your pageview count. It’s just like the old auto-frame-refresh trick, but this one’s better because most of the ad networks haven’t banned it yet. That’s their problem, right? Why should you leave money on the table? You’re a business.
But it doesn’t really work as well as you had hoped because only a tiny percentage of viewers will actually read page two. You know that, but you don’t care, because you won’t give up a chance to make a few extra cents. Who cares if it annoys the crap out of that tiny slice of your audience? Who are they, anyway? The people who actually read your content thoroughly instead of skimming the headline and moving on? That can’t possibly be your most important audience segment — they’re just the most involved and attentive. Repeat customers. You already have their “eyeballs” that you can sell to your real customers. And these dupes get their eyeballs double-counted. What a steal!
Keep up the great work, publishers.

Dear Steve Blank, this is incredibly irresponsible

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:11:38 -0500

Dear Steve Blank, this is incredibly irresponsible:

rafer:

caterpillarcowboy:

rafer:

Steve Blank Quote:
It should go without saying that this post is not advice, nor is it recommendation of what you should do, it’s simply my observation of how companies using Customer Development positioned themselves to successfully raise money from venture investors.

Rafer sez:
I’m all for being non-judgmental, but this is ridiculous. When you are in a position of authority, it’s incumbent upon you to say when something is a terrible idea. Do not publish instructions on precisely how a founder would poison the next couple years of their lives.

I’ve shared my thoughts on it, but I’m curious (since you have more experience than me) what you find so objectionable.

Rafer sez:
@cowboy You aren’t the only one who asked, so I must have been unclear. Blank is laying out a path to raise a round of capital before there’s a business. Raising such a round has such a tiny, tiny probability of providing economic benefit to first time founders that it’s the startup equivalent of Russian Roulette instructions — using five bullets instead of one.

He ought to have written “Don’t do this” across the top in big red letters. And since that’s the case, why write it at all?

Scott: I think we have two totally different take-aways from this article. First, Blank outlines “what companies ‘used’ to do (read: still)” - business plan -> funding -> execute.

In the second section, he goes on to suggest if you follow Customer Development and iterate to product-market-fit (or at least close enough to it), *that* is the time to raise money, when you need it to fuel a viable business, and can demonstrate to VCs that you have a viable business (or are close to it)

How does this poison a founders next couple of years? Still unclear on your objections.

OMFG. “You rarely know what’s going to turn up on...

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:21:00 -0500

OMFG.

“You rarely know what’s going to turn up on one of those wacky Spanish talk shows, but in no way were we expecting this. This man has trained his dog to dance, and we mean really dance. As the caption on Live Leak’s website puts it, “this dog dances better than you.” (via Huffington Post)

Too bad the show Dexter is in a bit of a decline, because my...

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:51:22 -0500

Too bad the show Dexter is in a bit of a decline, because my girlfriend & I had a killer costume this halloween ;-)

Apparently, my dream conference room became a reality in...

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:44:00 -0500

Apparently, my dream conference room became a reality in Facebook’s new office space.

via giantrobotlasers Click through the image, this info-graphic...

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:32:07 -0400

via giantrobotlasers

Click through the image, this info-graphic rocks!

Nice! Amazon RDS: http://ping.fm/fB3F1 (cloud MySQL w/ elastic resources)

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:58:41 -0400

Nice! Amazon RDS: http://ping.fm/fB3F1 (cloud MySQL w/ elastic resources)

Interesting listing on MVP tools/tactics: http://ping.fm/hK4pK

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:54:54 -0400

Interesting listing on MVP tools/tactics: http://ping.fm/hK4pK

"It’s so important to launch fast that it may be better to think of your initial version not as a..."

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:13:20 -0400

“It’s so important to launch fast that it may be better to think of your initial version not as a product, but as a trick for getting users to start talking to you.”

- http://www.paulgraham.com/really.html (via shellen) (via hiten)

thegongshow: Caterina Fake’s recipe for a focused, productive...

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 10:30:11 -0400

thegongshow:

Caterina Fake’s recipe for a focused, productive day. Very cool (and very nicely designed). I wish I had the self-discipline to implement this, but both the nature of my job and the way my mind spins hold me back.

——————
singletasking (via caterina)

Good lord, what has science done?! (via hiten: iomegadrive...

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:13:14 -0400

Good lord, what has science done?!

(via hiten: iomegadrive agentmlovestacos)

Finally Deactivated my Vark.com Account

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:23:00 -0400

As a startup, Vark.com is doing a lot of interesting things. I really dig their IM interface, the breadth of ways they store, share, & answer questions, the interesting statistics regarding “median time to answer” and other fun facts about how well the service is humming.

Ultimately, though, it has a single fatal flaw: it fails to provide personal value to the nucleus of expert users that provide value to the wider user-base.

Josh Porter (aka Bokardo) explains this problem succinctly in a post title “The Delicious Lesson”:

The one major idea behind the Del.icio.us Lesson is that personal value precedes network value. What this means is that if we are to build networks of value, then each person on the network needs to find value for themselves before they can contribute value to the network. In the case of Del.icio.us, people find value saving their personal bookmarks first and foremost. All other usage is secondary.

Vark.com fails to provide experts any lasting and meaningful value… “Why should I spend my time and energy answering these questions?”

This isn’t unrecoverable. Vark could provide experts value in the form of notoriety by ‘scoring’ their contributions and providing a category leader-board, appealing to their ego or compulsion to beat the ‘game’.

Perhaps there is some other clever offering, but the lesson is: there has to be something.

Just your typical Roger-Rabit-esque morning here in...

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 11:47:24 -0400

by , made at

Just your typical Roger-Rabit-esque morning here in Brookline.

We launched a neat new site called “my.doink.com” last week. Let’s you make animations with imported sounds and imagery. It doesn’t require registration to play with the tool, so check it out! We’re gluttons for feedback.

thegongshow: Internet pundits are (rightfully) really excited...

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:42:36 -0400

thegongshow:

Internet pundits are (rightfully) really excited about this PhotoSketch demo where you draw stick figures, and it generates real composite photos to match your drawing.

caterpillarcowboy: infoneernet: Netflix data shows shifting...

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 10:21:38 -0400

caterpillarcowboy:

infoneernet:

Netflix data shows shifting demand down the Long Tail

The vertical axis is percentage of total demand (with ratings used as a rough estimate of rentals), and the horizontal axis is the popularity rank of the DVD titles. Between 2000 and 2005, the Netflix selection grew from 4,500 DVDs to 18,000, and the effect on the demand of this increase in variety is shown above.

Seen at The Long Tail

Thanks for posting this*.

Chris Anderson misses a huge point: the shift in demand is due to the Netflix recommendation system. People did not become magically more eclectic and less interested in new releases in 5 years. The recommendation system is built with one goal in mind: encouraging customers to rent older movies they will like to shift demand away from new releases in order to reduce the amount of new releases Netflix needs to purchase upfront (and be stuck with 3 months later).

Compare Amazon’s recommendation system and Netflix’s.

Amazon wants to recommend to you whatever it is you are most likely to buy. The more popular the item is, the better, because Amazon can negotiate better prices when they can buy in large volumes.

Netflix wants to recommend to you the movie that makes you say, “Oh yeah, I’ve always wanted to see that movie!” Unlike Amazon, Netflix’s business model is not predicated on inventory turnover. If you buy 1 million copies of the latest new release, you’re going to get 1 million copies returned to you once people are done watching it. Now you’ve got to either warehouse 1 million copies of a no-longer-new-release movie or sell / destroy the used DVDs.

So Netflix’s goal is to distract you into choosing an older movie over a new release, because that allows them to distribute that demand over their entire inventory.

Interesting data! Yes, I’d agree that’s Netflix’s goal (to shift demand down the curve for distribution efficiency) but I’d bet their customer approval is rising as well, so perhaps they are ‘allowing’ people to deviate from the herd. Either way, interesting stuff.

"debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code..."

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 14:45:32 -0400

“debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.”

- Brian Kernighan - Clever ideas that failed (via giantrobotlasers)

Some incredibly novel thinking (from a software engineer) for...

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 11:47:52 -0400

Some incredibly novel thinking (from a software engineer) for treating tumors… full story here, worth the read.

Complete GAE + Lift + Maven project zipped up, with datastore

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 09:16:00 -0400

kevingame:

Here’s the link to the zip: http://euclid.poundcs.org/~kevin/cleanGaeWithLift.zip There’s a readme there explaining what to do to get it to work (it should be simple). I’ve sprinkled the pom.xml file with comments describing why I’ve done certain things the way I did. Any comments on it would be greatly appreciated. The project includes a single, simple datastore object (User.java - yes, I made the datastore objects in Java since I had some troubles injecting Scala classes. I’ve read it’s doable, but I wanted to tackle one thing at a time) which can be used as an example

Kevin has been doing some awesome bleeding-edge infrastructure work lately. His goal is to get continuous deployment + GAE + Scala + Lift working, and he’s almost on top of it. Really looking forward to leveraging this for extreme rapid development. Great work, Kevin!

"It’s time for us to start thinking of every piece of content – books, blogs, albums, TV shows,..."

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 18:54:13 -0400

“

It’s time for us to start thinking of every piece of content – books, blogs, albums, TV shows, movies, everything – as a new little startup. We have to look at fundamental business questions right from the start: what is the right audience? What is the right revenue model? And, most importantly, what could we do right now to answer the riskiest of these questions. In other words, what is the minimum viable product?

Just like with startups, this is a hybrid question. If our goal is just to create a blog or a YouTube video as a hobby, there’s no need for this kind of rigorous process. And if you want to write the great American novel – and don’t care if anyone reads it – you don’t need this either. But for the rest of us, who create content because we care passionately about having an impact on the world, we need to rethink the process by which we do it. We can’t just delegate the business questions to some media executive.

”

- Lessons Learned by Eric Ries

DNA Replication Animation. Woah. (via here)

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 15:25:49 -0400

DNA Replication Animation. Woah. (via here)